“Understand, for her she was very happy saying that maybe within four to five months she’ll be able to come,” says Mutaba. “But after I have given to her that news, she was very disappointed. I was just trying to say that do not lose hope that anything may happen. Maybe the president may change his decision, we never know what may be next.”

It makes for a scintillating narrative, but the problem is, there’s no evidence that any of the people behind any of these accounts are actually who they say they are, despite numerous attempts by reporters to do just that. Of course, as the @RoguePOTUSStaff account points out, that secrecy is baked into the very design: They can’t risk being discovered! (They did not immediately respond to a request for any confirmation about their identity).

There are things that are important and helpful and good and there are things that, regardless of validity, are distraction from the real stuff, the real agency.

“I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from,” Cheney said on a Monday appearance on the radio show. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.”

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post–9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

Go pour yourself a stiff drink and read about all the way the EO was super illegal, then remember that nothing matters and that the DHS tweeted this …https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/825745689191841792

The section on refugees does not apply to religious minorities who face “religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” In other words, non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are exempt, making this a very clear Muslim ban. The text does not include references to green card holders or dual nationals of those countries, but the State Department and Homeland Security are currently including both of those groups as well in their interpretations.

Keep an eye on this list. It’s being updated.

Look there isn’t much else that you aren’t watching. This stuff is really messed up.

Important talk around what we should be raging about. It’s all bad, but what is most acutely dangerous? what should i literally not even?

While plenty of progressive political junkies are insulted by the idea that we can’t “walk and chew gum simultaneously,” there is a limit to how much we can ask of the people we’re attempting to motivate.

One issue up for consideration of rage—it seems the president fully intends to profit from his position.

The Constitution is a favorite talking point in American political rhetoric. It holds enormous legal power — the Supreme Court has the power to measure laws against it, and strike them down and hold them up.

Yet at the end of the day, the Constitution is also just a piece of paper. It depends on people to enforce it.

Beshear rebutted Bevin’s claim, saying his office “is actively defending agencies sued over House Bill 2. In doing so, we have taken the most aggressive action possible, moving to have the entire case dismissed as to those agencies.

“I would suggest in the future that if the governor has any questions on the hard work of my office that he walk across the hallway and ask to meet with me, and not hide behind Facebook.”

Bev is scary good at getting his message heard in ways that people listen.

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican president says he regrets and rejects the US decision to build a border wall

One person who frequently talks to Trump said aides have to push back privately against his worst impulses in the White House, like the news conference idea, and have to control information that may infuriate him. He gets bored and likes to watch TV, this person said, so it is important to minimize that.

To me, this is the interpretation more fraught with danger for the admin: he's delusional and not fully in control of his faculties. https://t.co/fpEsw3QYUs

“These illegal acts are clearly designed to chill the speech of protesters engaging in First Amendment activity,” Maggie Ellinger-Locke, of the guild’s DC branch, said in a statement.

None of the arrest reports for the six journalists makes any specific allegations about what any of them are supposed to have done wrong.

Even if they all get off–not withstanding the other non-journalists who look at real prison time without direct evidence of involvement–the problem is with the courts that will inevitably have Trump/Pence/Bannon appointed judges in the next few years. It will get worse before getting better.

Saying he needed more information on the the foundation’s real estate holdings and the board’s “activities in the past,” Schnatter abstained from a measure the foundation passed that requires that acquisitions of property be approved by the entire board.

Trump has been resentful, even furious, at what he views as the media’s failure to reflect the magnitude of his achievements, and he feels demoralized that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.

“The government identified 364 counties across 21 states where it argues that concentration in the Medicare Advantage market would rise above the presumptively unlawful level if the merger proceeds, and 17 counties across 3 states where that would be true in the public exchange markets,” he said in court documents.

I’ve been surprised at the extent to which right-thinking people are all but threatening themselves with what Trump might do to, collapsing into their own sense of powerlessness. Maybe he’ll jail his opponents! Maybe he’ll call off the 2018 election! Here it is worth remembering things we learned from the campaign. Trump’s one true gift is his ability to get his critics to surrender up their own dignity somehow of their own free will. That is just what he is trying to do to the press at this moment. It’s no different from the dominance politics he played on his opponents in the GOP primaries.

Journalism doesn’t die with authoritarians, but it damn well better adapt to them. Continuing to ask multi-part, open ended questions to a man who can scarcely finish a sentence from whence he began is not the right direction.

The Washington demonstration was amplified by gatherings around the world, with march organizers listing more than 670 planned events nationwide and another 70 cities overseas, including Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Mexico City, Berlin and Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, where the temperature was 6 degrees below zero.

V cool.

These things may not constitute hands-on political involvement, but they sure do inspire the ones who are in the trenches. Hopefully it adds to their numbers.

In all, Mr. Trump has named only 29 of his 660 executive department appointments, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which has been tracking the process. That is a pace far slower than recent predecessors, falling far short of the schedule originally outlined by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was Mr. Trump’s transition director before Mr. Trump ousted him 10 weeks ago.

That’s less than 1:22 positions filled because I can math.

Since his election on Nov. 8, Mr. Trump has had little interest in the minutiae of his transition, saying it was “bad karma” to get too involved, according to a person who spoke with him at the time. At one point, he wanted to halt the planning altogether, out of superstition, the person said.

I do this any time I’m prepping for a new job, tbh. Why should we expect that he would do work? Oh, and that vacation was already planned, so we can’t expect him to cancel.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

I read this a lot when #45 first became relevant in the 2016 primary. It’s one of the rare raw and personal things Thomspon ever wrote.

It’s hard to fathom here, safely ensconced in the ivory tower of liberalism in which I do my juice cleanses, that a presidential candidate boasting about sexual assault resulted in zero consequences whatsoever, but if you ask those who voted for him, it’s really not that big of a deal. Sixty-one percent of Americans overall said they were upset by the tape, yet 65 percent of Republican men found it to be much ado about nothing. What’s a little pussy grab between acquaintances, right? Just ask Christopher von Keyserling, a Republican official in Connecticut, who was arrested this week for trying as much on a colleague and then claiming it was just a joke.

I love this dude.

RTing me is a sworn contract to follow me do not violate this I am litigious

During their powwow at Trump Tower in December, it was reported that the businessman-turned-kinda-sorta-politician discussed wanting to get Kanye involved in an “entrepreneurial leadership” capacity. But I guess he had less “traditionally American” ventures in mind for the MC, none of which are of the prestigious 3 Doors Down and Toby Keith caliber.

I kind of don’t know what the Kanye/Trump thing was or is about anyway. I have a theory about Kanye West, but that’s for another day.

SACS’ decision will be made by its own board, and Pinto said “it’s hard to predict what a board decision will be. But when I look at it and look at the legislation that’s being passed and my understanding of how SACS makes decisions — and really it’s all about supporting universities to achieve a certain standard that is defined in their policy documents — I feel confident in the alignment of their policies and they will lift probation.”

Guarantee there was a Koch logo displayed prominently somewhere in the room.

All of these outcomes are plausible. Too many pundits and political scientists still assume that we live in ordinary times, in which political shifts are slow, voters consistently reject radical parties and candidates, and opinion polls are a reliable guide to election results. But the last year shows that we now live in extraordinary political times. It’s perfectly possible that 2017 will be as bitter as 2016.

But while a dose of pessimism is important, confident predictions of doom are as simplistic as mindless optimism. The real lesson to draw from the nasty surprises of 2016 is not that populism will always win or decency always lose; it’s that the range of realistic outcomes has widened radically.

Yeah, it’s important to prep for the worst, but I can’t survive 4 years (or … 8) without keeping one eye on optimism.

And I say this — and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you’re maybe not as good of a parent — I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids. I just don’t. I think that we can’t say “This school is not good enough for my child” and then sustain that system. I think that that’s just morally wrong. If it’s not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?

🌊

This is a huge thing that gets skirted because it requires civic duty be more important than our kids. Or at least more important than our prescribed path for our kids.

It’s so hot, I’m gonna abandon thread.

🇺🇸

In retrospect, the most unrealistic part of Batman Returns is when a tape is leaked of The Penguin being awful, and it ruins him politically

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.

In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

“The people responsible for the University of Louisville, for all of our public institutions, are the people that you the voters and you the taxpayers hired through your votes to actually do this job,” said Bevin. “The legislature and the office of governor — this is how it works. We don’t answer to editorial boards, we don’t answer to self-serving individuals who might have a political agenda. We don’t answer to the attorney general or to any given judge. We don’t answer to accrediting agencies. We answer to you. We answer to you, the voters.”

But Bevin and Trump’s confident, unvarnished speaking styles ooze with authenticity compared to the sanitized, generic language politicians from both parties rely on, said Republican operative Scott Jennings, a past adviser to President George W. Bush and Courier-Journal contributing columnist.

“To me, the coin of the realm right now is authenticity,” Jennings said. “Donald Trump and Matt Bevin don’t apologize for who they are or what they’ve accomplished in life.”

To be fair, he did endorse Hillary during the election. But watching this casual conversation, it’s not hard to see some common ground with Harvey and someone who might admire, if not necessarily approve of, the President Elect[1].

I’m not super stoked about Trump, or Trump inauguration adjacent things so I’m going to attempt at a refrain from the President Elect for a while.

“It’s interesting, when you have something iconic in a range when people pay attention to it, it’s hard,” Glover continued. “You want to live up to the expectation, but you can only live up to your own.” The actor added that he thinks directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord are “amazing” and that he’s thrilled with co-star Alden Ehrenreich, who plays young Han.

So we need to stiffen our spines and broaden our embrace, grasp tightly but reach out far. The conservatives who see Trump for what he is and are shocked by it—and there are many, though not as many as there should be—should be welcomed. We can postpone arguing about the true meaning of the Second Amendment while we band together to fight for the Constitution that precedes it.

Two minutes after this story was posted, the Bevin administration sent out a press release announcing that three members of the Governor’s Postsecondary Education Nominating Committee have resigned and are being replaced by three new gubernatorial appointees, all of whom are women and at least one of which is African-American.

The new appointees to the committee are Betty B. Cook of Somerset, Janet L. Stephens of Scottsville, and Angela Denise Minter of Louisville. Minter is African-American and the executive director of Sisters for Life, an anti-abortion group that she loudly protests with outside of Kentucky’s only clinic that performs abortions, in downtown Louisville on Saturday mornings. She appeared in a campaign ad for Bevin in 2015.

There is a parallel debate about the FISA Amendments Act’s warrantless surveillance program. National security analysts sometimes search that act’s repository for Americans’ information, as do F.B.I. agents working on ordinary criminal cases. Critics call this the “backdoor search loophole,” and some lawmakers want to require a warrant for such searches.

By contrast, the 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American’s identifying information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations, not for ordinary criminal cases. And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign power.

However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.

This is the kind of stuff that is so boring and seems harmless and oh wait someone’s at the door.

“What I believe to be the case is we have people sitting around desks in Washington, D.C., deciding on how things should be done,” he said. “I do have a problem with people on high dictating it when they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the area.”